Friday, August 04, 2017

F. B.
Meyer’s Keswick ecumenicalism, however, did not extend only to sacramentalists,
Quakers, and Pentecostals within the broad pale of Christiandom. Pagans who knew nothing of Jesus
Christ and who—according to the Bible (John 14:6; Acts
4:12; Romans 1)—are worshippers of the devil without hope or God in the world,
could also be saved without ever hearing about or knowing the Lord Jesus.
In India, following his practice in other countries, Meyer preached, instead of the gospel, the Keswick doctrine of sanctification to idolators trapped in the darkness of Hinduism because he
believed that God had already given Hindus “revelations” of himself, and that
their “tears and prayers come up as a memorial before God,” although not
offered to the Triune Jehovah, but to their abominable idols, so that they were
in need only of “further revelations” through Christ. Meyer affirmed: “I [am] . . . deeply convinced that the prime
work of our missionary societies is to discover the souls . . . the
non-Christian natives . . . with whom the Divine Spirit has already been at
work, ascertaining the stage which they have reached in the divine life, and
endeavouring to lead them forward.”[1] The Keswick theology was important to pagan
Hindus and other non-Christians, for many of them already possessed “the divine
life” and just needed to move forward, and, of course, nothing could move
idolatrous polytheistic Hindus forward to a deeper spiritual life than Keswick
theology. Preaching the Higher Life to
such people was, for Meyer, the prime work of missionary societies, and Keswick
doctrine would strike a better cord with such Hindus than preaching the
objective and finished work of Jesus Christ and justification by repentant
faith alone in Him, since Hindu mysticism and quietism were like Keswick
doctrine. Meyer testified:

At
the close of an afternoon service in one of the public halls of Bombay, a
number of intelligent and thoughtful men . . . non-Christian natives of India .
. . gathered round me, who said that my teaching of the inner life, and
especially of the negation of self, was not what they were generally accustomed
to hear from the lips of a Christian teacher, though it was exactly in line
with much that was taught in their own religious books. They told me that one
objection which they had towards the religion of Jesus Christ was that, so far
as it had been presented to them, it seemed so exclusively objective in its
testimony, and gave so little room for those deeper teachings of the subjective
discipline of the spirit which appeared to them so all-important. . . . It is
interesting to recall the eagerness with which the non-Christian natives of
India heard from my lips teaching as to those higher or deeper truths [of the
Keswick theology] concerning the crucifixion of the self-life in order to the
indwelling of the Son of God.[2]

Hindu idolators were not the only ones who could be saved
without knowing Jesus Christ, of course;
pagan religious leaders “from all races” could lead one to heaven, since
nature revealed all that was necessary for salvation. Meyer’s belief in “a kind of nature
mysticism,” found very prominently and notably in his own oft-repeated
testimony to his entrance into the Keswick experience, led Meyer to believe that
“Wordsworth and all his followers were . . . students in the school of Jesus
Christ. . . . Nature was being given greater emphasis at Keswick than had
previously been the case in evangelicalism.”[3] Such nature mysticism led Meyer to “often”
leave the “Keswick tent to breathe in both the Keswick air and the Holy
Spirit,”[4]
for Meyer would pray: “Father, as I
breathe in this breath of the evening air, so I breathe in Thy gift of the Holy
Spirit.”[5] After all, Meyer had entered into the Higher
Life himself originally by breathing God in after a meeting led by George Grubb
at Keswick.[6] In any case, the heathen did not even need to
live up the light that they had to be saved, since none of them do so (as is
true, and which justifies their universal condemnation, according to the
Apostle Paul in Romans 1-2, though not according to Mr. Meyer); some kind of vague faith in their pagan gods
was enough for the heathen to be saved, just as in Christiandom one does not
need “accurate views of that redemption”
wrought by Christ to be saved, but simply a faith that is the same in kind with
that of the allegedly saved pagans:
“[M]yriads of souls, who lived and died with no other teaching than that
of natural reason, have entered into the Kingdom . . . and they have been
admitted on precisely the same terms as those on which we [Christians] hope to
be accepted.”[7] Perhaps these heathen breathed in the Holy
Spirit with the evening air, as Meyer did.
In any case, it was certain that accurate views of redemption were
unnecessary, for Meyer himself did not hold to them—for example, he rejected
the doctrine that Christ’s cross-work was a propitiation (Romans 3:25; 1 John
2:2; 4:10): “We must never think that
our Lord stepped in to appease the otherwise implacable wrath of the Father.”[8] For a Keswick revival to come, the universal
church must reject the work of Christ as a propitiation of the wrath of God for
a doctrine of atonement by her own blood and self sacrifice: “[T]he Church . . . accounts that her blood
is not too great a price to pay for an atonement through love and
self-sacrifice—it is only under such circumstances that a work of lasting
revival can be inaugurated.”[9] In light of these affirmations, clearly for Meyer the
old orthodox doctrine of Christ’s blood atonement was not necessary for
salvation. Meyer received further
support, as he supposed, for his doctrine that a vague faith in a deity was all
that was necessary for salvation from his gross misunderstanding of Old
Testament theology, seen in the alleged fact that throughout the Old Testament
Israel believed the that the Lord was “God of the hills alone,” but not “of the
valleys also”—the truth that God was the Omnipresent and Omnipotent One over
the whole world, including the valleys and the hills, was allegedly only
revealed in the New Testament.
Furthermore, Meyer thought that from the creation of the world until the
day of Pentecost the Trinity was unknown, and the saints of Scripture accepted
the blasphemy that the Holy Ghost of God was “an atmosphere,” not “a Person.”[10] If people who knew nothing of the Trinity,
who thought God was only a local deity who controlled hills but was powerless
in valleys, and who rejected the orthodox doctrine of Christ’s blood atonement,
could have faith and be saved in the past, they could be saved in the same
manner today also; people within "Christianity" who simply have the vague faith in a god that one can receive from
natural revelation are saved, Meyer taught.
After all, if accurate views of the atonement of Christ, the Trinity,
and other fundamental Christian doctrines, are necessarily part of saving
faith, the ecumenicalism of Keswick must fall to the ground, and the heretics
that founded the Keswick theology and filled so many of the seats of Keswick
conventions would be unconverted—a clearly unacceptable conclusion. Those “earnest brethren . . . [who] denounced
[Meyer] as a heretic”[11]
were certainly mistaken, and just were not ecumenical enough; neither was Naaman when he confessed to
Elijah, “now I know that there is no
God in all the earth, but in Israel” (2 Kings 10:15), nor Paul when he affirmed
that pagans were without hope and without God (Ephesians 2:12). Meyer was not nearly as narrow as the
Scripture and its Author:

Not
from the Hebrew race alone, but from all races, God has called forth great
souls . . . the great Prophets and Teachers of the Race . . . who have received
His messages for their contemporaries and all after time. We utter their names
with reverence, and acknowledge the important contributions that have been made
to the religious history of the race by Confucius, Buddha, Zoroaster, Plato,
and other prophetic souls, who have reared themselves like soaring Alps above
their fellows, catching and reflecting the light of the Eternal.[12]

Zoroaster, Buddha, and other pagan devil-worshippers
were actually prophets who received messages from God, just like those received
by the Prophets of the Bible; their
teachings, writings, and religious systems were not the proclamations of
idolatry to be detested, but “sources of
religious knowledge and inspiration,”[13]
as the Bible is an inspired source of religious knowledge. Alongside of the Bible one may recognize the
inspiration of the “Vedas . . . Krishna . . . Seneca” and other pagan writings
and writers; “the founder of the Moslem
faith” also gave a “noble witness,” and “Marcus Aurelius,” that “loftiest of
pagan moralists,” was a righteous heathen although he “cruelly persecuted the
Christians of the [Roman] empire,” so not only those ignorant of Christ, but
those who put His people to death, can be saved and be vehicles of Divine
revelation. From the message of pagan
writings, the heathen receive “revelation of the truth” and “righteousness is
imputed to them,” although they “know nothing of our Lord’s work on their
behalf.”[14] Unsurprisingly, while uplifting the documents
of pagan religion to the level of inspiration, Meyer downgraded the verbal,
plenary inspiration of the Bible, accepting modernistic ideas such as a
documentary hypothesis about the composition of the gospels comparable to the
modern “Q” theory[15]—“Meyer
was a late nineteenth/early twentieth-century Protestant liberal who took
modern biblical criticism for granted, and was not a fundamentalist. . . .
Fundamentalism . . . was a divisive force which . . . placed an overemphasis on
doctrine and dogmas.”[16] Pagans, and their writings, Meyer thought,
“are a striking comment on those great words of Malachi, ‘From the rising of
the sun even unto the going down of the same, God’s name is great among the
nations, and in every place incense
has been offered unto His name, and a pure offering; for His name is great
among the Gentiles,’”[17]
although Malachi actually was not affirming that pagans were worshipping the
true God and making pure offerings as they served their idols through human
sacrifice, temple prostitutes, and the like, but predicting the future
Messianic kingdom when the Gentiles would reject all idolatry and purely
worship Jehovah alone through Jesus Christ, as validated in the translation in
the Authorized Version, which correctly has future tense verbs where Meyer
employed the present tense: “For from
the rising of the sun even unto the going down of the same my name shall be great among the Gentiles; and
in every place incense shall be
offered unto my name, and a pure offering: for my name shall be great among the heathen, saith the LORD of hosts.”[18] Phonecian Baal-worshippers in Tyre and Sidon,
and even the sodomites who sought to gang-rape other men in the cities of Sodom
and Gomorrah and who were destroyed by fire and brimstone from heaven (Genesis
19), could be saved—for God knew the faith that they had, and their real,
fundamentally positive attitude toward Him:
“God, who searches the heart, and knows what would have happened in Tyre
and Sidon and the cities of the Plain, if they had heard of the mighty works of
Christ, deals with them on the basis of the faith they have, anticipating the
hour when that faith, which is an attitude towards God, and the embryo capacity
for receiving God, shall no longer be an unfurled bud, but shall open to its
full radiance and glory in the tropical atmosphere of heaven.”[19] Since Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims,
animists, and even idolatrous sodomites who practice gang-rape, could be saved
without ever hearing the name of Jesus Christ, and certainly without a
conscious conversion to Him, their problem was not that they were certain of
hell in their religions—rather, it was that they lacked the power for service
to God provided by the Keswick theology. Meyer was
Keswick’s great international ambassador because of his belief that heathen
people could get eternal life through faith in their gods, but they needed the
Higher Life only found in the Keswick doctrine to discover the secret of a
happy life on earth. As in the Quakerism
of Hannah W. Smith, Meyer believed men are not totally depraved, and religion
ignorant of Jesus Christ can bring people to heaven, but Meyer thought non-Christian
religions could not supply power for service—only Keswick could. “It is a mistake to suppose that the state of
the world, as it is today, is due to the determined choice of man to be evil,”
for men are not determined to evil, and it certainly is not the case that
“there is none that seeketh after God” (Romans 3:11) or that “every imagination
of the thoughts of his heart [is] only evil continually” (Genesis 6:5)—rather,
all men have a “better self,” so that even in “Heathenism . . . [m]en have seen
and approved the better,” and “the heart of man never ceased to feel after God
. . . the soul of man has ever cried out for God, for the Living God . . .[and]
sighed with unutterable and insatiable
desire for light and life and love.”
Just like the world developed through long evolutionary ages, getting
better and better over time, so the heathen are getting better and better over
time. While heathens are not totally
depraved, and many will be in heaven, nonetheless they do not have the power
supplied by Keswick: “the state of the
world . . . is due to inability to be
and do the things which reason and conscience alike demand. . . . Natural
Religion cannot supply power.”[20] Romans 7:14-25 is a description of both the
righteous heathen who are headed to heaven without knowing of Christ, and of
Jews in the Old Testament[21]—the
heathen will be saved, just like many Jews before Christ were saved, but power
for service was lacking to both—hence the need to preach to the heathen, not so
much justification by the objective substitutionary work of Christ, but the
Higher Life of Keswick theology.
Keswick, not the gospel, was the need of the idolator.

[3]Pgs.
46-47, Transforming Keswick:The Keswick
Convention, Past, Present, and Future, Price & Randall.Part of this emphasis on nature was the
strong cultural influence on Keswick in favor of Romanticism;at Keswick, “sentiments which embodied some
Romantic traits and which could at times seem to be less firmly anchored in
older scriptural orthodoxy . . . [were] voice[d],” and not by F. B. Meyer
alone, but also by Evan Hopkins, Webb-Peploe, and others.Indeed, “Keswick was . . . a symptom of the
Romantic inclinations of the period . . . what was distinctive about it did
derive primarily from the spirit of the age, and can be understood only in that
light.”Both philosophical “romanticism”
and “relativism” contributed to the growth, popularity, and teaching of Keswick
(pgs. 45-47, 254, ibid).It is is
noteworthy that Wordsworth was born in the Lake District, where the Keswick
Conventions were held.

[5]Pg. 47,
Transforming Keswick:The Keswick
Convention, Past, Present, and Future, Price & Randall.Compare the words of A. B. Simpson:““I had to learn . . . every second, to
breathe Himself in as I breathed, and breathe myself out. So, moment by moment
for the spirit, and moment by moment for the body”(“Himself,” A. B. Simpson.Elec. acc.
http://www.biblebelievers.com/simpson-ab_himself.html).

[6]Pgs.
103-104, The Keswick Story:The
Authorized History of the Keswick Convention, Polluck.

[18]Cf.
Haggai, Malachi. The New American Commentary, R. A. Taylor & E. R.
Clendenen on Malachi 1:11 for a defense of the future tenses of the verbs in
translation and a Millenial interpretation of the verse.

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About Me

I got lots of learnin when I was in cemetery. I also gots books I try to read. I has preecht throo most of the books of the Bible spositorally. I is marreed and has 4 youngins---3 is gurlz. Me am indipendint Babtist. Pleeez reed my blog.